T. Boyle - Water Music

If one managed to survive such horrors, there was always kala azar or dumdum fever. A chronic disease, invariably fatal, kala azar makes its presence known by the appearance of pustulating epidermal ulcers, marasmus and enlargement of the spleen. And then there was leprosy, the most dreaded affliction of them all. Relentless in its gross deformation of the body, malignant and hideous in its gradual abrasion of the extremities and the slow but persistent degeneration of facial tissue that leaves its victims looking like pitted prunes. Balla jou , the locals called it: incurable.

And then of course there were the more prosaic diseases, the ones that were largely responsible for saving thousands of French, English, Dutch and Portuguese colonials the expense of cemetery plots back in Paris, London, Amsterdam or Lisbon. Malaria headed the list, closely followed by dysentery and yellow fever. Their victims — tradesmen, slavers and soldiers of fortune alike — would literally sweat and shit themselves to death, often within a week of their arrival on what had become popularly known as the Fever Coast.

There were no cures. Various quacks prescribed bloodletting, calomel, laxatives, and emetics to encourage “a gentle puke.” Or Dr. James’ Powder, a talc-and borax-based product no more effective in combating disease than candied orange peel or horsehair pillows. Jesuit’s bark or cinchona had been known since the 1600’s as effective in treating malaria, but the evidence current at the turn of the nineteenth century was against it, labeling it a quack remedy like all the rest. The poor blundering star-crossed soldiers and explorers of the day didn’t have the vaguest conception of what caused the host of appalling disorders that decimated their ranks and crushed their hopes. It was generally believed that miasmata, “putrid exhalations from the earth,” brought on the ravages of these fevers and digestive cataclysms. The mosquitoes, flies and sandfleas? Why bother even to swat them.

And so it was at Goree, the little blister of volcanic rock just off the coast of Senegal that was home to the Royal African Corps. Heat, filth and disease. Inadequate supplies, beggarly broken soldiers recruited from the hulks, a scarcity of drinking water, the sickly yellow wash of the sea. Degradation, debilitation, death. Things were so bad that the garrison commander (a career soldier by the name of Major T. W. Fitzwilliam Lloyd whose improprieties [5] had so alienated his superiors that he’d been given the choice of discreetly shooting himself or taking the post at Goree) was forced to halve food rations, double the brandy allowance and issue the following standing orders: Gang No. 1 to be employed digging graves as usual. Gang No. 2 making coffins until further notice.

It was the winter of 1805. The dry, salubrious season, when there was a bloom in every wasted cheek and a faint fey smile on every pair of cracked lips. When insect populations were down and sun baked out your lungs and dried up your bowels. But already the eternal forces of meteorological change were at work, the earth spinning round the sun, tilting on its axis, winds hissing, clouds mounting in the south like celestial armies.

Before long, it would begin to rain.

♦ OH MAMA, CAN THIS

REALLY BE THE END? ♦

Ned Rise wakes with a headache. Or no. Not a headache. A sort of generalized racking misery that makes him feel as if his pores are bleeding and his brain is leaking out his ears. Weak as a nonagenarian, he props himself on an elbow in the darkened dormitory and listens to the wheezing and moaning of the others as they toss on their sweaty pallets. He recognizes the racheting gasps of Jemmie Bird, one of his mates on the work crew, the oral flatulence of Samuel Purvey and the puling intermittent whistle of Boyles, hardly distinguishable from the whine of the mosquitoes. It is dark as the grave. Two o’clock? Three? Ned turns to reach for his gourd of rum and suddenly he’s doubled up on the floor, that fiery demonic pain tearing at his guts until he can do nothing but stiffen and champ at the wooden bedpost until the spasm passes. But it doesn’t pass. It mounts in waves like a storm hitting the beach until it leaves him rocking and moaning and clutching at his stomach like a woman laboring to deliver a monster.

When he wakes again, he finds himself in the middle of the floor. He is wet with his own perspiration and his trousers are crusted with the yellowish serum he’s been evacuating these past few days. There is a stench of illness in the air — of catastrophic, all-devouring illness, of illness like a hungry, insatiable thing — and someone is whimpering softly at the far end of the room. It is then that the chill takes hold of him again, gently at first, like a dog with a rodent in its teeth. Then it comes on with a vengeance and Ned hugs his legs to his chest, teeth clacking, his head jittering at the tip of his spine like a jack-in-the-box. The cold is terrible, worse than the fire. He can feel the ice floes poking at him, the dark cold grip of the Thames, the tread of polar bears dancing on his chest, he looks up into the blackness and sees crystal igloos and Eskimos dead in the snow. He struggles to push himself up and stagger back to his pallet and the feeble warmth of his army-ration blanket. But he can’t. He can only lie there, huddled, while all around him the darkness opens like a mouth.

♦ A LOAD OF ASSES ♦

Pennants are flying, mainsails, topsails and jibs rattling in the breeze, the prow slicing the water as neatly as a scythe while whales spout and dolphins leap and a fine invigorating salt-sea spray fans out over the rails like a nimbus. Sea and sky are a matched set, blue as delftware, and the sun is nothing less than a stupendous spotlight fixed in the middle of it all — as if the world were a stage indeed and the ship and its crew approaching the denouement of some momentous command performance. The atmosphere rings with the joyous braying of the asses as their nostrils dilate round the rich and multifarious scents of landfall, with the huzzas of the sailors and the wild exuberant strains of Georgie Scott’s clarinet as he soars through “Over the Sea to Skye,” “Jolly Mortals, Fill Your Glasses” and “O An’ Ye Were Dead, Guidmen.” Bracing, is what it is.

Mungo Park stands at the rail of the Crescent , His Majesty’s military transport, and looks out over the spanking blue waves to where the island of Goree heaves up out of the sea, crenellated battlements and great stone barracks scintillating in the sun like something out of a fairy tale. At his side, Zander, Georgie Scott, and the four carpenters he’d recruited from the hulks at Portsmouth. At his back, forty-five asses. Dun-colored, with stubborn, red-veined eyes. They razz and stink, lift their tails, spatter the decks. “This is it. Zander,” the explorer shouts, throwing an arm round his brother-in-law. “There’s no stopping us now!”

♦ ♦ ♦

Perhaps not. But they were very nearly stopped on the glossy conference tables of London and Portsmouth, the expedition ground down to nothing under the foot-dragging heels of Pitt’s wartime government and Lord Camden’s somnambulist’s shuffle. Mungo had rushed down from Scotland in September — at Camden’s urgent request — expecting to leave before the month was out. He’d dodged Ailie, briefed Zander on the sly, and drawn up a detailed list of supplies and equipment necessary for the expedition. He’d even come up with a proposal that would warm the cockles of the most mercenary bureaucratic heart. At Sir Joseph’s suggestion, the explorer had emphasized the practical benefits of the proposed expedition rather than the purely scientific ones. There was gold in the Niger Valley, he asserted — more even than in Guinea or Ashanti — and a host of primitive black nations mad to trade massy lumps of it for a few beads, mirrors or pewter gravy boats. And if the British didn’t claim it, the French would. To plumb the Niger was a mandate that went beyond science, beyond national pride even — it was good sound business sense.